Pure Exploitation

I feel somewhat bad saying this, but I find exploitation to be incredibly amusing. I'm not talking about something small like some lazy dickhead mooching off of his girlfriend year after year. I'm talking about highly organized, systemic exploitation on a massive scale. I'm talking about the kind of exploitation that bankrupts developing nations, the kind that causes people to pay too much for sub par cable television and broadband service. I'm talking about the kind of exploitation that's protected by law. You don't just get millions of people to simultaneously bend over and say "please fuck me" without a certain degree of finesse, and I respect that. It's also the reason why I love capitalism so much.

Let me be clear: I don't think exploitation is necessarily a good thing. I actually think it's quite terrible. But it's also hilarious, like a puppy who's too scared to climb down a staircase because his depth perception isn't fully developed. Sure, it's kinda sad, but still funny enough to warrant a second or third watch on YouTube.

The thing about capitalism is that it's not a zero-sum game. People compete in a free market with the goal of making a profit. Everyone wants to get more than what they put in and in the end, a few people come out out on top, and just about everyone else gets fucked. This is because with capitalism, someone has to get fucked. It's inevitable. Want a system where everybody wins? Too bad, go establish a commune on the moon you socialist twat.

The funniest part about the whole thing is that the people who are most likely to come out on top in the capitalist game are the people who ignore our society's most cherished values. Be honest, they say. Work hard and be kind to your fellow man. Don't be selfish, be altruistic. Remember Steve Jobs? What a cunt, right? Well he's a cunt who died with eight billion dollars to his name. What about Carlos Slim? For those that don't know, he's a fat Lebanese prick who made a metric shit-ton of money by monopolizing the telecommunications industry in Mexico and overcharging people for their phone service.  He's also the world's richest man with a net worth of $73 billion. That's just a little bit more than the nominal GDP of the Sultanate of Oman in 2011. He also made his fortune in a country where 17% of the population lives in poverty. What a riot. I mean even if you take his philanthropic works into account, that's pretty fucked up.

You might be thinking that this is a gross oversimplification of the capitalist system, and of course it is. If you want an in-depth look, go read Das Kapital or On the Wealth of Nations. My point is that when we extol the virtues of an economic system that encourages us to give up some of our greatest cultural values, the result is a kind of irony that's just too delicious to be ignored. And if every attempt at reconciling our values with the way we make a living ends in failure, then perhaps it's time for us to seriously re-examine ourselves as a society.